Thyroid patients at risk from ‘overdiagnoses’

Low-risk thyroid cancers that are unlikely to develop into anything sinister are being picked up by sophisticated scanning equipment, exposing patients to needless and harmful treatment, doctors have warned.

This includes unnecessary thyroidectomy, the surgical removal of all or part of the thyroid gland, according to doctors writing in the latest edition of the British Medical Journal.

Juan Brito, an instructor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, argues that the expanding gap between the number of thyroid cancer cases diagnosed and the number of deaths from the disease suggests that low-risk cancers are being overdiagnosed and overtreated.